Digital Creativity

ISSN: 1462-6268 (Print) 1744-3806 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ndcr20

Charlie Gere’s Digital culture

Mike Leggett

To cite this article: Mike Leggett (2003) Charlie Gere’s Digital culture, Digital Creativity, 14:4,
255-256, DOI: 10.1076/digc.14.4.255.27883

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1076/digc.14.4.255.27883

Published online: 09 Aug 2010.

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Digital Creativity
2003, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 255–256
Review
Charlie Gere (2002) Digital culture.
Reaktion Books, London. (ISBN 1 86189 1431) Paper: £14.95; $US 25.00
“The machine is always social
before it is technical”, Gilles
Deleuze reminded us many
years ago and the adage is
pursued rigorously in Charlie
Gere’s recent survey of compu-
ter-based process, which he
reasonably describes “…as a
kind of cultural archaeology,
digging under the surface of our
contemporary digital landscape
in order the reveal the underly-
ing structures that gave it its
present shape”.
In a context of interna-
tional academic and gee-whiz
publi-biz, this is a refreshingly
lucid and (almost) complete coverage of the 200
year ecology of the machines which come closest
to being the apotheosis of Western culture—
alongside, say, the car. His references and method
are classically European, not afraid to quote Marx
and Smith when describing the development of
Artificial Intelligence or Analytical Engines, or
machines from Jacquard looms 1810 onwards,
précising extensively the work of key luminaries,
be they scientists and technologists, inventors and
entrepreneurs, artists and philosophers, even the
occasional politician.
This is no easy task, untangling the nodes
and blind alleys of the literature and coming
through with a cogent narrative, aided with stock
shot illustrations and a layout reminiscent of a
scientific textbook—clear, concise with perfect
tonality.
Organised via a series of themes, the
chronological overlap occurring with such an
approach leads to apparently displaced sequences,
more particularly to an occasional sense of
repetition. Such structural problems in presenting
this complex and seminal field are more than
balanced by the needs of the undergraduate and
specialist reader who is led toward the next theme
at the completion of the current one, before a bit
of rewind in order to examine the following
genesis in greater detail.
1462-6268/03/1404-0255$16.00
© Swets & Zeitlinger
Gere moves through 19th century commu-
nication systems, office tools, touching on the
cinema (a co-conspirator that later had a part to
play in defining system configurations), and with
careful regard for the laws of exchange, moves
inexorably to the demands made by wartime
politicians and generals, the gate-keepers of 20th
century cybernetic development. The genesis of
the modern era is pieced together like a thriller,
the reader recognising the significance of each
piece of detection work achieved 50 or 60 years
ago in relation to the contemporary machine and
its use. Not everyone gets a look in though—it’s as
if Europe and the USA won all the prizes—and
pockets of individual activity that existed all over
the globe are overlooked, unless they happen to
have stepped onto one of the main stages. For
instance, CSIRAC (1949–64) was the first
automatic electronic stored-program computer
built in Australia and one of the first in the world.
It’s also the only first-generation computer still in
existence. Some would claim it still runs the tax
system…
The discoveries that flowed from the
pioneers were not only of benefit to science and
weapons makers but to modern disciplines like
cybernetics, (cybernétique: the art of governing
(1834), the word and its concept having a
Classical derivation), molecular biology,
structuralism, and theories of information,
general systems, maths, control, games, etc. The
investigations as well became a source of
metaphors to describe the effect the new
machines would have, with terms like informa-
tion technology, the electronic society and
cyberculture. The development of interdiscipli-
nary practice within the sciences, a strange
notion back in the 1930s, led on to the more
recent insertion of science thinking into other
contemporary disciplines, in particular the
humanities, becoming a part of the milieu
where one set of propositions, investigations and
outcomes directly affects another. The descrip-
tion extends into succinct contextualising of the
role of realpolitik in the development of the
tools and systems in question. For example the
 Review
Digital Creativity, Vol. 14, No. 4
Cold War development in the USA of the SAGE
defence system that demanded ‘real-time’ comput-
ing in the hair-trigger matter of nuclear warfare,
followed more recently by the equally absurd SDI
‘Star Wars’ institutive—such projects represented
rare opportunities for massive government-funded
research, the spin-offs of which benefited both
commerce and the two streams Gere then
examines in some detail—the informal research of
artists and the agitational work of the counter
culture.
In a matter of 36 pages he again manages
to capture the main players, from Cage through
Fluxus to the seminal Cybernetic Serendipity
exhibition in London and on to Jodi and ZKM.
Revealing distinctive shifts is the main issue in this
section, where the way in which the artists’ work
with media, in thinking about perception,
cognition and the role of the audience when
confronting conceptual issues often expressed with
the barest of means, is delineated. Though Gere’s
focus is on structure, details like the short account
of the Lettriste group, their critique of the ancient
technology of literacy and the social codes
continuing to flow unseen, help bind the simple
act of transgression into an image of the times,
where alliances and opportunities for mutual
benefit were constructed on-the-fly in provisional
formations based on geographical communities
and communities of interest. Away from the
coterie, political activists, hearts firmly on sleeves,
aligned with sex and drugs and rock‘n’roll to create
a space within the military-industrial complex for
tools like personal computers and video and the
Whole Earth Catalogue to establish models for
alternative and oppositional life-style.
Hard on the heels of the re-invented
consumer society come the first generation of
Daniel Bell’s ‘theoretical knowledge’ workers,
preparing for the new brave world of the post-
industrial, information technology era. The
Internet though a constant reference throughout
this ‘flexible chronology’, is dealt with in detail
here reflecting the curious alliances and conflu-
ences of the time that brought it out of the
government and university labs and into the
256
public domain. One of the few gaps in the saga
precedes the wider availability of the Internet
making little of the 1980’s era peer-to-peer
accessing, when an extensive global network of
BBS ‘nodes’ (FidoNet, GTNet in Australia)
laboriously copied files from computer to compu-
ter over regional and local phone connections.
With the help of sympathetic university system
administrators for intercontinental links, local
subscribers could then log-in to collect mail and
copy files, usually at no cost. The very ordinariness
of such committed enthusiasm for extending the
processes of cultural communication and dissemi-
nation continued the earlier cultural tendency of
elevating alternative social practice possessed by
intriguingly hazy objectives, over the objectives of
the market-place that were for the majority of the
population, enervating at best and plainly
destructive at worst.
The Structuralists, the postmodernists,
even the Futurologists had anticipated this vector
and the final chapter—Digital resistances—cleverly
adumbrates the arguments of a range of thinkers
and brings us into the contemporary era via
techno, hacking culture, the new graphics and
liberation via the Internet. Digital culture reminds
us of the lesser known theorists such as Mikhail
Bakhtin whose “…work enabled a reintroduction
of the historical into the structuralist paradigm,
with its insistence on the necessity of understand-
ing a work within its particular context”. It was
from here that Julia Kristeva (and others) devel-
oped the idea of intertextuality and from where a
work like Digital culture essentially springs. In so
doing it also demonstrates the skilled use of
compression (so much a feature of the technology
itself ) in synthesising this overview. Charlie Gere
achieves this using a commentary which is
thorough in its broadly-based reference, careful in
its summation and imaginative in its presentation,
providing the reader with the relatively painless
task of decompressing the narrative, leaving the
reader well informed and with an invaluable
reference source book on the shelf.
Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney (UTS)